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I feel empty on the inside. Day and night pass me by like a train moving rapidly across the tracks.
People are talking to me and I know they’re talking because their lips are moving, but I don’t hear nothin’. It’s as if I’m up in a plane and my ears haven’t popped. Everything is muffled. Nothing sounds or feels right. It takes a moment for things to register.
“Buttercup, we have to keep going with our lives,” my dad told me yesterday. “Your mama would want that. So tomorrow you’re going to school. You’ve missed two weeks.”
Why should I ever go back? I was doing fine with reading and taking my own notes. I thought this, but I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t said anything out loud since the accident. I’d become mute.
The only words I’ve expressed are written down in this furry journal that the Grief Therapist gave me. I don’t want a stinkin’ journal. How do you talk to paper?
“Maybe you can do like Celie in The Color Purple,” Dr. O'dea, my therapist, told me. “You can write letters to God.”
So that’s what I've done. Every day since I got this journal, I’ve written the same thing:
Dear God,
I don’t like you.
Or
Dear God,
You make no sense.
To make matters worse, I’m still waking up at 5 a.m. on the dot and my birthday will now always be remembered as Mama’s death date. It angers me, but I have yet to shed one tear. Not even a drop. My whole body is in shock, I guess.
Gram touches my shoulder softly. “Clove baby, lemme do something to your hair. It’s a mess.”
I know it’s a mess. I haven’t felt like doing much of anything. I’ve showered and kept up with basic hygiene but I haven’t combed my hair in days.
I sit down on the floor in the living room and Gram sits above me. She pulls and tugs at the kinks in my hair. I don’t even wince. Next, she puts some coconut smelling cream in my hair and lets it sit there for a minute. She begins talking about different things going on in the world, like how mothers are losing their sons to police misconduct. But I'm still reeling over the fact that a drunk driver gets to live after taking out my mama. I’d heard that the driver was a woman and all she got was a broken leg. I can’t quite identify what I'm feeling. I’m numb, but I know for sure that I hate her.
Gram stops talking and turns on cartoons. Maybe she thinks the silly antics will lift my spirits. I watch as one character smashes cake into another character’s face. It makes me think of all the cakes and delicacies Mama will never get to make again.
No more Tres Leches Cake or fresh baked cinnamon rolls. No more Ginger Molasses cookies that she makes at Christmas or Chess Pies for Easter. No more making me sweet treats if I have a bad day.
I remember when I came home from being pushed in the mud by Tisha Marshkin. Mama had to take off work to pick me up from school. She let me cry all the way home. I showered and came out of my room to find that Mama had put on her apron and pulled out measuring cups, spoons, flour, sugar, butter, and Seven-Up. We made a Seven-Up Cake. It was the first cake I learned how to bake.
“Something sweet makes the heart feel better,” Mama had said.
She could do so much. Her dream was to travel to France with me after graduation. It was going to be a girls only trip. Me, Mama, Mrs. Jourdan and Gram. Mama and JJ’s Mama had become the closest of friends. They talked to each other all the time.
None of that matters now.
Gram tries detangling my hair again. This time the process is much smoother. She parts it down the middle and puts it into two French braids that drape over my shoulders.
There is no smell of coffee in the house. Nor soft murmurings of talking and praying like my parents used to do in the mornings. The house feels dead.
The box of skates that Mama came back to get are sitting by our media console, all crushed up. Just looking at them leaves me sick to my stomach. Had I not forgotten them, none of this would have happened. I will never forgive myself, God, or that crazy drunk lady who drove into Mama.
Gram touches my shoulders to let me know she’s done and I grab my backpack without so much as a glance in the mirror. Maybe I look decent, maybe I don’t. Who cares?
The front seat of my Dad’s 1980 Cadillac Coupe de Ville smells like Mama so I get out of the front seat and sit in the back. It’s somewhat better.
The clouds in the sky are so dense that you wouldn’t know the sun even came up. Looks like there might be a tornado today. We’ve all learned to watch for the signs of a twister; humid, cloudy days are one of them. Regardless, here I am going to school as if life is normal, as if a twister didn’t just come in and wreck my own world, spinning it, tossing it up in the air, and then making it all funky and messed up.
What if I have a bad day? Who’s gonna bake something sweet for me? Who’s gonna tell me that it’s okay and that tomorrow is a new day? Who can I talk to?
Dad sits in the driver’s seat and turns on his car. “You ready, Buttercup?” he asks me.
What kind of question is that? No, I’m not ready. I will never be ready. I want my mama and I want her right now.
In my backpack there’s a picture of us at the skating rink when I was five. It was before I had gotten vitiligo. My skin was still all brown. No giant, Africa-shaped white patch had taken over my left cheek yet. That came three years later. In the photo, Mama had this really big smile and her hair was flat-ironed straight and flowing down her back. I gaze at her adoringly.
I put this photo in my backpack because I need her with me. I have to have something with her face on it to go with me today.
Dad starts the car and I look up at the dark, angry sky. It mimics how I feel.